Monthly Archives: February 2014

As previously discussed by this blog, The Greater Western Library Alliance and publisher Springer have partnered to create the Occam’s Reader project. The pilot program will begin in March and allows the corsortium of 33 academic libraries to share e-books via interlibrary loan.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article outlining how the project will run. The software allows the lending library to upload the e-book onto a web server. The patron requesting the e-book at another library recieves an email with a username, pasword and link to a log-in page. The user can then sign in and read the requested book. Borrowed e-books can be read but not copied, printed out or downloaded and are automatically deleted from the server at the end of the designated interlibrary loan period.

Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protections has released a report discussing the availability of electronic books to public library users. The report is divided into three sections and considers (1) whether and how e-books are made available to public libraries, (2) problems with current practices and (3) recommedations to increase the availablity to e-books to library users.

Importantly, the report recommends ‘investing in a State run e-book distribution platform so as to provide the State’s libraries with greater flexibility in acquiring and managing their e-content’ and ‘exploring mechanisms to increase the availability of funds to State libraries to address the added expenses of maintaining an adequate e-book collection’.

Over 5,000 HarperCollins e-book titles are now available on OverDrive for UK customers, including school, public and university libraries. Borrowing terms are the same as for U.S titles: each copy purchased may be borrowed 26 times before its license expires and a new copy must be purchased. The Overdrive blog post is available here.

The Occam’s Reader Project (a collaboration between Texas Tech University, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) ) and publisher Springer have entered into an agreement to run a one year pilot program allowing e-book interlibrary loans (ILLS). Although ILLS have always been possible under the terms of Springer e-book licenses, there was no process for doing so. The new software creates a process for requesting, processing and delivering e-books.

This is the first major collaboration of its kind between academic libraries and a major publisher and has the potential to revolutionize how e-books are shared by libraries.